With multiple diaries and societies, keep up to date with what you are doing by colour coded calendars which fit seamlessly on your screen. These interact with your email and desktop clients, and can be integrated with your mailing list groups too.

With Outlook Live, you can interact with contacts over all suspported instant messaging networks. Even if you're sat in the library on Outlook and your friend is at home sitting at Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger, you can still chat to each other in real time.

Once the system is rolled out to your university, the global address list or university directory wil be part of the contacts list. No longer will you have to trapse through mountains of web pages; just type in a name and it'll search within the entire directory. Not only that, it'll give you details of their availability - when you can email and when you can expect a result if they are out-of-office.

If you have a wealth of knowledge and wish to share it with others, help others with their work or just discuss things with them, you can create groups as mailing lists so people can interact with each other over an email interface.

Not only can you create groups for your classes but you can join them as if they were mailing lists. Keep up to date with your course or your modules by joining society or convenor's lists and be part of the peer mentoring process.

Whether or not the actual number of features is low, there are multiple sets of options for the same thing: you can hit reply, reply all and forward at least three times on the same screen. Is this filling space for lack of real options?

Instead of being faced with a mass of options which confuse and muddle the average user, the options have been modified to make your experience an easier one. These include setting an out-of-office or "vacation" messages, connecting Outlook Live with the Outlook desktop client and setting up other accounts.

With the support of the cellular industry, when you are away from your all important email or have a device which doesn't allow mobile Outlook access, you can set up text messaging notifications when you are on the go. I can't test this, however, as I'm not in the United States.

The level of detail in the user experience is quite high; with a mixture of Hotmail and Outlook Web Access features, they have moulded it into a stylish and functional experience - even with slight details such as right-click menus.